Standards-Based Messaging in Windows Azure

Windows Azure supports standards for messaging protocols at the network layer as well as the web-services layer. This standards-based messaging support means that the entire application does not need to be deployed to Windows Azure at the same time. Some application components can be moved to Windows Azure while others can continue to be in an on-premises application, thus providing deployment flexibility and ease of migration.

Network Messaging Protocols

Windows Azure directly supports these network protocols, thus providing broad access to the platform. The architecture of a service hosted in Windows Azure is based on discrete scalable components built with managed code. These components are termed roles:

Web roles communicate with other roles in a service via a single internal HTTP endpoint.

Worker roles can define any number of external endpoints for HTTP, HTTPS, and TCP.

The following services in Windows Azure provide endpoints for these protocols:

REST

REST is a software application architecture modeled after the way data is represented, accessed, and modified on the web. With REST, there is no need to add extra specifications like SOAP. RESTful web services typically map the four main HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) to referred CRUD actions (respectively Retrieve, Create, Update, and Delete).

Support for REST translates to broad reach for Windows Azure, which provides RESTful access to almost all services, including: